G. Case: Mercat Dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Santa Caterina
H. The North Fort Area

I. Mapping the Market

5458

Churchgate Station,
Mumbai

6

0. Introduction
As India becomes a player on the global stage, questions of an Indian “identity” become
vital both in how the country views itself and how it is viewed by a world audience. While the
nation’s recent commitment to the historic preservation of built artifact implies a new awareness of
the architectural record as an important aspect of its anthropological past, India’s changing political,
economic, and social landscape has raised questions about a more self-conscious architectural
practice in the present and its implications for the nation’s future. Does the productive and creative
initiative inherent in design share a responsibility in the forming of a nation’s self-conception and its
writing of a national narrative?
In the late 19th century, art historian August Schmarsow wrote that “architecture prepares a
place for all that is lasting and established in the beliefs of a people and of an age; often, in a period
of forceful change, when everything else threatens to sway, will the solemn language of its stones
speak of support.”1
Speaking from a time of impending war, and placing himself firmly in the framework
of National Romanticist theory, Schmarsow’s sentiment seems at once thoroughly outmoded and
entirely fresh. The turn of the 20th century was for architecture, as it was for the world, a time of
great turmoil. The same holds true, once again, a century later. For Schmarsow and the tradition

1

David Leatherbarrow “Architecture is its own Discipline,” In The Discipline of Architecture, Ed. Andrzej Piotrowski and Julia Williams Robinson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) 2001: 97

7

of national romanticism, architecture, among other types of cultural production, was a means for
nations to define and reproduce themselves in terms of past perceived greatness. It existed as both a
form of nation-branding and identity-politics used by countries like France and Germany.2 Because
of its tendency towards historicism and referential homage, national romanticism became tied with
regionalist theories in architecture, which insisted on the discipline’s maintenance of a connection
between building and locale.
As late as the mid-nineties, theorist Alan Colquhoun has attempted to couch the theoretical
debate in architecture during the first half of the nineteenth century as a confrontation between
enlightenment attitudes of the new Modernist movement and the romanticism of the Regionalist
movement. In Colquhoun’s demonstration, Regionalism, at this point in history, desperately argued
to imbue the built environment with a sense of meaning to counter feelings of placelessness and
alienating universality resulting from industrialization’s slow destruction of the notion of “region”
in post-war nation-states. The International style eventually won out, rendering the Regionalist’s
beliefs obsolete in the architectural discourse.3 In retrospect, Colquhoun’s characterization of the

weakness of the movement’s attitudes seems both overly generalizing and unnecessarily shortsighted. Scholar Vincent Canizaro distinguishes Regionalism as a subset of architectural theory that
has at different times served to defend certain architectural styles and practices as well as provide
a counterpoint to others. It is also multivalent, in that different regions and different notions of
the concept of region necessitated uniquely tailored ideas of Regionalism. In the end, what unites
the various currents of theory is, according to Canizaro, “the goal of establishing connections,
through architectural means, between people and the places in which they live, work, and play.”4
Canizaro’s assessment is a broadly outlined, and in some cases, indiscriminate, version of what
Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre termed “Critical Regionalism” in the 1980’s. This concept
was popularized by Kenneth Frampton later in the decade. In their terms, the Regionalist dialogue
makes neither historical-leaning nor referential proscriptions; it is not simply an ideology of style, but
rather an ethical and ideological proposition. As long as considerations about authentic experience
and locality are taken into account, Regionalist theory can then be married with any architectural
fashion. With this in mind, Colquhoun, like the flag-bearers of Modernism and the International
style, were perhaps too narrow-minded in their appraisal of ideas about Regionalism—considering
it only as a nostalgic and limiting movement.
When the International Style began its decline in the 1950’s with the failure of the Modernist
housing project and city planning, it was criticized as technocratic and unfeeling—architecture had
lost touch with the people it served. Sprouting from this dissent was a new post-modern sensibility;
just as Modernism was criticized for its cultural muteness, a new theory emerged that favored a
semiotic approach, using architectural referents as communicative currency. Postmodernism’s
moralist tones sought to recreate the discipline’s ability to interface with its users at a human level,
and so, Regionalist values resurfaced, this time married to another style.

4

Canizaro: 17

9

Fagus Werk, Walter
Gropius and Adolf Meyer,
1913

Saynatsalo Town Hall,
Aalvar Aalto, 1949

10

By the 1970’s and 80’s architects like Michael Graves and Richard Meier had become
celebrities in the field and were designing works internationally. As Hans Ibelings points out, the
Postmodern movement went through an ironic shift as architecture saw the rise of “postmodernismbred auteur-architects whose signature was readily recognized in their work. As the demand for
branded ‘high-design’ grew, these Postmodernists who once championed regionalist notions
of contextualism and sensitivity were suddenly stamping numerous buildings with their specific
signature in the furthest corners of the world”.5 So, after a brief resurgence, regionalist values were,
for the second time in a century, tossed aside.

5

Hans Ibelings, Supermodernism (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers) 1998: 28

Piazza D’Italia, Charles
Moore, 1980

11

This turnabout is important in that it is indicative of the effect that the onset of globalization
was beginning to have on the discipline itself. As architects garnered higher levels of fame, they
began working abroad, taking their self-styled design processes with them. With the advent of the
first transnational design practices in the 1960â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, architects began to practice in global terms.
And yet, at the advent of the 21st century this practice faces new crises of relevance and
autonomy. Architecture, in the last century has seen two world wars, industrialization, Modernism,
Postmodernism, and now, the dawning of a new era. From our vantage point, August Schmarsowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s
words once again ring deeply. What are the beliefs of this new people? What is lasting and
established in this new age? There is indeed a period of forceful change upon us. Will architectureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s
stones speak again?

12

1. The Elephant in The Room
Though India is often called an ancient culture, its
modern incarnation seems to me rather more like
an adolescent wearing the clothes of its ancestors,
while searching desperately for a style to call its
own.6

How does a country like India situate itself in the discussion of globalization? While
the implications of homogenization and the supermodern condition are certainly valid in the postindustrial developed nations of the West, what bearing do they have on the localized and regionalist
traditions of India?
Although the process of industrialization began early in the nation’s history— with the
British East India Company’s occupation in the late 1700’s—industrial development has been
relatively slow going. One could easily argue that India has not until very recently caught up to
western standards of an industrialized nation. Further, contemporary Indian cultural identity is
complicated by the fact that India is a relatively new sovereign state. Although the area’s indigenous
civilizations predate development in much of the western world, the young nation of India has faced
remarkable growing pains since it its Independence in 1947.

Since that date, India has become the second fastest growing large-scale economy in the
world, yet wealth distribution and income inequality continue trending towards lopsidedness.7
Despite friendly relations with much of the world, India’s borders are still not wholly defined, and
the relationship with neighboring Pakistan over the state of Kashmir remains volatile. Issues of
demographic distribution and the spread of urbanity have come to a head, as the nation ranks only
33rd in terms of population density, yet still boasts seven of the world’s ten most densely packed
cities.8 Domestically, the secular country has been severely tested by sectarian violence and rioting
amongst Hindus and Muslims, even as recently as 2002.
As nationalist and state-based political parties rename Empire-era cities and buildings to
reflect local dialects and culture, it is clear that in its adolescence, India still struggles with concepts
of self-identification. For practicing architect Romi Khosla, “the need to define contemporary Indian
architecture as a continuum of Indian history and identity [is] a debate that is at least a hundred
years old amongst European and Indian architects in India. It is a debate that has kept posing
questions about the need for contemporary Indian architecture to have roots in Indian tradition…
[Yet] it’s almost as if the impact of globalization has wrenched out the need to define Indian identity
as a cultural motif in the work of the younger architects.”9 In the midst of this political, economic
and cultural turmoil, architecture’s importance as a key to identity and experience is certainly
challenged.
The document of India’s architectural heritage before British Colonization in the late 17th
century is a rich and varied one. The plurality of vernacular architecture as seen in typical dwellings,
public gathering places, and religious buildings reflects a sensibility about its equatorial climate, its
needs as a predominantly agrarian society, the ritual practices of varied religious traditions, and the
influence of migrant and invading communities from abroad. Still, today’s India is a very different
place than this history would describe, and its pre-colonial architectural record has less to do with a
discourse about identity and the discipline today than does the work of the past four centuries.

14

7
8
9

“Briefing Rooms: India,” United States Department of Agriculture October 2008 <http://www.ers.usda.gov/Breifing/India>
“List of Cities Proper by Population,” Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population>
Romi Khosla, “Dialogues in Indian Architecture After Le Corbusier” A+U October 2007: 72

15

In looking for a key to Indian-ness through architecture, one might begin with John Begg, a
British architect who arrived in Bombay in the early 1900’s. In his first work there, the General Post
Office completed in 1909, Begg developed a style, dubbed “Indo-Saracenic,” that was later used in
numerous buildings throughout the subcontinent. While massing and structural relations showed
the new style to be closely related to many of the Victorian monuments previously built in India, it
was in the varied textures, playful surface articulation and use of regionalizing ornamentation that
an Indo-Saracenic architecture spoke so powerfully to the national imagination. Begg’s work is a
crucial starting point in that it was presciently effective at putting local tradition into dialogue with
imperial power from abroad.
Thirty years later, metropolitan Bombay adopted an Indian-flavored art-deco in reinforced
concrete from the European capitals and transformed Bombay from a Victorian city to an international
capital overnight. Movie theaters and hotels became the important landmarks of India’s gateway
from the West. The Indian City, with Bombay in the lead role, played an important part in the nation’s
self-identification, powerfully reflecting mechanisms of social dynamics and cultural values.
It was in the 1950’s, as a result of the new Indian Independence, that perhaps the most
striking example of architectural nation-building occurred, with Nehru commissioning Le Corbusier
to plan the city of Chandigarh and design its government buildings. Necessitated by the division
of the state of Punjab during India’s historic Partition from Pakistan in 1947, the creation of a
new capital in the state of Punjab was, for Nehru, of the utmost symbolic importance. The prime
minister’s thoughts strongly capture the spirit of his perception of the newborn nation-state:
I do not like every building in Chandigarh. I like some very
much, I like the general conception of the township very
much but what I like above all, is this creative approach of
not being tied down to what has been done by our forefathers
and the like but thinking out in new terms, trying to think
in terms of light and air and ground and water and human
beings, not in terms of rules and regulations laid down by
our ancestors.10

16

10

Jawaharlal Nehru, Speech, 17 Mar 1959

General Post Office,
John Begg, 1909

17

Siteplan, Chandigarh
Capital Complex. 1955

Chandigarh Capital
Complex, Le Corbusier

18

In the end, Nehru himself proved to be a Critical Regionalist. Corbusier’s work in Chandigarh is
archetypal in the ways that it reflects an iconic, Indian character without falling to pastiche. The
buildings in Chandigarh are extraordinarily Indian, not necessarily in form, building technique or
ornament; it is rather the fact that they powerfully symbolize the nation’s vision of a pluralistic,
modern secular democracy, diverse in religion, tradition, and ability. Critic Peter Serenyi writes,
In the buildings of Chandigarh’s capitol complex, Le
Corbusier offered a powerful architectural interpretation of
the moral force inherent in India’s executive, legislative and
judicial branches of government. He also expressed in them
India’s aspiration to become the foremost leader in the world
as envisioned by Gandhi and Nehru. No wonder that in his
outline of the city’s program he noted that ‘responsibilities of
aesthetics and ethics equally dominate the work.’11

The Corbusean legacy paved the way for India’s first generation of important homegrown architects
in Balkrishna Doshi, Raj Rewal, and Charles Correa.
Correa’s search to find a voice for contemporary Indian architecture is particularly
interesting, in that there exists a clear struggle to maintain a positive tension between a nationalist
representation and a postcolonial marginalism. His exploration reached its peak in the late 1980’s
with the designs of Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur and the British Council Building in Delhi. While
both clearly bear the mark of Correa’s hand, the Kendra is far richer as a cultural artifact, and its
successes are important in illustrating the shortcomings of his work in Delhi.
The Kendra is designed on a nine square parti, a direct reference to the city plan for nearby
Jaipur, which itself is based on the nine square mandala of the planets important in Hindu, Buddhist
and Jain religions. Many important Hindu temples have followed this plan, and Correa was certainly
aware of this as well. In diagrams for the building, each self-contained square delineated by loadbearing walls, represents one of the known Hindu planets, with the center courtyard, open to the sky,
signifying the sun. This courtyard has an intricate step pattern that recognizably imitates ancient
Indian temples. Further, Correa strategically places large paintings and mosaics, both Hindu and
Jain, like advertisements for the “Indian-ness” of the site.
11

Peter Serenyi, “Corbusier in India” Perspecta 1983: 118

19

The effects of representation in a national architecture that at once tries to point to its roots
while at the same time showing a modern sensibility is especially difficult—a treacherous path that
straddles the line between the creation of kitsch and productive tension. In noting and listing the
ways Correa uses signs and semiotics in architecture, one begins to discover the differences between
simply reproducing a sign (which results in a building that is a copied text) and a more critical approach of cultural representation (which allows a reading of the building as an incessant text). In
his essay, “The Public, The Private, and the Sacred” Correa writes:
Architecture based on the superficial transfer of images from
another culture or another age cannot survive; architecture
must be generated from the transformation of those images;
that is by expressing anew the mythic beliefs that underlie
those images. 12

And it is precisely in Correa’s deployment of the agglomerate of these symbols that the Kendra’s
success is guaranteed. By completely opening the center square and allowing views through the
resulting courtyard, the representation of the mandala is allowed to be solely and purely that: representation. Since it only exists in plan views and diagrams, Correa’s treatment of the mandala is,
in effect, only understood as a symbol in a vaccum: a staid image. Experientially, the ambulating
circulation paths and seemingly limitless cross-views dissolves one’s understanding of the grid.
Thus walking through a Hindu temple is nothing like walking through the Kendra; Correa has transformed the symbol of the mandala, allowing the viewer’s experience of a multivalent architecture
to illustrate Correa’s view of the pluralism imbued in Indian culture. Vikramaditya Prakash goes
further with this idea of obfuscating “traditional” representation.
I would suggest that this desire for anchoring is best left suspended. I would propose the somewhat duplicitous strategy
of suspending a parodic veil that would reveal by concealing—that would re-cover—the unfathomable depths of the
‘truth’ of our ‘identities.’ Such a veil can also, like a pliable
and multicentered fishing net, better resist the penetrating
desires of hegemonical cultural tendencies.13

This phenomenon of resistance to the labeling of “Indian-ness” is perhaps best used at a place like
the Kendra which celebrates regional arts and craft since, according to Jyotindra Jain, “the unofficial
folk culture of India has always maintained its anarchic autonomy despite colonialising efforts to
regularize the character of its production.”14
Correa’s British Council, it could be argued, was a more difficult and charged brief. Here,
Correa was asked to design a contemporary building housing the Council’s headquarters in Delhi.
Citing a desire to express the layered history of India, Correa sets up a linear axis through the building along what he calls “three axes mundi”. At the entrance in a marble clad foyer is the “European”
symbol representingt the Age of Reason. Past the foyer, the building opens onto a courtyard centered on the Char Bagh or Islamic representation of the Garden of Paradise. At the end of the axes
is a Hindu spiral symbolizing the cosmos.
Again, Correa’s dependence on the architectural mechanism of the sign is clear, but while
the open axes allows one to see through the building along this line, there is neither dialogue between, nor an obfuscation of the symbols. The layering is purely an optical and conceptual one, not
phenomenological, and the composition remains static, with each image simplistically framed by its
area in the plan. It is as if the building, through the representation of three distinct symbols, aknowledges the force that each of the three cultures has held on the development of the Indian nation.

While evocative of the 9 square mandala parti of Hindu temples, the Kendraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s plan allows for access from all sides, encouraging a conceptual pluralism important in notions of Indian
identity. The myriad views across its quadrants at once complicates and enriches the experience of the building.

22

The British Counciâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ls system of referents is, phenomenologically, much simpler - a linear layering that only works along one axes.

23

Even as the questions posed by Correa’s work remain unresolved, a new “post-postmodern” condition has arrived in India in the form of the IT park, the shopping mall, and the gated
condominium complex. For Doshi,
India is a society in which lifestyle, climate, building
patterns, and local economies were in sync until disrupted
by globalization, industrialization, the modernizing effects
that accompanied post-colonialization, the adoption of alien
models for architecture and the technological capability to
ignore climate. These forces stretch and reweave the web of
life according to new parameters…15

While the first results of this importation may seem grim, sterile and alien, the Indian nation has a
talent for harboring heterogeneity. Only here can one find the analog sophistication of Bombay’s
dabbawallahs16 coexisting with the complex systems of computer programming. The streets of India
are evocative of this order, where Rolls Royces pull up alongside ancient auto-rickshaws and park
beside sacred cows. The IT parks and call centers are an inevitability and an opportunity: a stated
case, a given and a constraint that welcomes dialogue and forces an architectural act to respond.
Keller Easterling recognizes India as a new front in the battle between meaning and the ultramodern
in her book Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades. In detailing
the shift from an American dominance of cultural control to a new state of post-signification, she
writes,
In its [IT parks], the architecture of South Asia’s c-band
urbanism mixes with televisual and media images to make
special political signs. In America, television and film store
futurologies in ephemeral broadcasts, while architecture
stores neotraditional sentiments. In India, television has
been politicized by neotraditionalism, while the architecture
of broadcast urbanism often embodies futurologies. In
India, special effects and ephemeral fantasies accessorize
the cultural imagination that makes a business of software
exports. Architecture is instrumental in privileging imagery
over interactivity. This architectural “face” even sometimes
resembles a more primitive still image from the screen
itself—a software environment of colors and implied
movement.17

24

15
16
17

Canizaro: 110
The lunch box delivery men who, without the aid of computers, navigate the infinitely complex system of lunch pickup and distribution through the world’s worst traffic to over 200,000 clients each day.
Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (Cambridge: MIT Press) 2005: 150

I.T. Park Designs, India

25

26

2. Hyperworld
The new age is a globalized era where economic, political and socio-cultural phenomena
change and interact in a process of homogenization and world-flattening.

As borders become

permeable markers of ever-marginalizing nation-states, a unified community has begun to emerge:
the global village of the 21st century. Symptomatic of this enormous shift are vast changes to the
economic markets, as trading has come to take place at a global level and geographic adjacency
to clients is no longer a requirement in the service industries. Politically, the terrorist attacks of
September 11th, 2001 can be seen as having triggered the first war of the globalized era; one where
the United States has taken up arms not against another nation but rather against cultural ideologues.
Such trends have necessitated the rise of new political entities like the International War Crimes Court,
where the accused are tried by intercontinental tribunals. On a social level, the global village is both
larger and smaller than previous social models: smaller in that transportation and communication
networks have linked the entire world. People miles away can be reached quickly, making cultural
interchange as easy as picking up a phone or turning on a laptop. Yet, while geographical obstacles
have all but disappeared, the global society is in many ways larger and more inclusive than ever.
As accesibility to travel and telecommunication becomes ubiquitous, more people can afford plane
tickets and cell phones and are thus involved in a never-before imagined planetary dialogue.

While the importance of nations has waned, the dense urbanity of the city has become

symptomatic of the supermodern age. The globe has changed from a patchwork of colored masses
into a hodgepodge of large dotsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the planet can be recognized as a collection of cities less and less

27

tied to the country in which they reside. According to a United Nations report published earlier
this year, over half of the world’s population currently lives in urban areas; the study projected
that by 2050 this percentage would be up to 75%. The global city capital has many faces. In 1993
Charles Jenck’s identified Los Angeles as an ‘urban heteropolis’. For Jencks, “cities like L.A. were
interminable urbanized areas with no coherent form, no hierarchical structure, no centre and no
unity.”18 Made possible through the improved linking of urban and suburban circuits, the scale of the
city is at once expanding enormously and fragmenting rapidly. Following these shifts is a similar
scalar transformation of the social networks within the urban heteropolis. In his essay, The Form of
the Future, Stephen Reed argues that:
Growing social polarization emerges at all scale levels;
within cities, where issues of access dominate and local
networks divide territories increasingly into protected areas
of privilege, and the no-go areas of the excluded; regionally,
where, for example the poor may become trapped in innercity areas while the better-off and more mobile occupy
suburban areas; between regions, which compete to position
themselves with the circuits of the global economy; and at
the global scale, where large sections of the world become
excluded from global economic networks.19

In this sense, Beijing is a heteropolis, Rio de Janeiro is a heteropolis, and Mumbai is a heteropolis.
The challenge to architects and planners here is the adjacency of, and mediation between, formal
and informal settlements. David Gouverneur points out that in new developing countries, growth
is not linear, contrary to early development in western countries. Instead, everything happens at
once in a previously unimagined density of space, in turn creating varied, complex, urban forms.20
Resulting ghettoes, slums, and favelas test the discipline’s need for control, as growing density
increases the tension between formal and informal settlement of urban space. On the opposite side
of the spectrum are the new one-off cities of Asia and the Middle East. Rapidly conceived, planned,
and built, these cities offer designers the chance to gamble at creating new Utopias as sustainable
environments and as sites for social experimentation. The vast range and scale of these urban

outcomes serves as notice of the dire questions confronting designers in the contemporary world:
the assumptions about city planning and the design of artifacts to affect change at urban scales no
longer hold. As the conditions of a globalized world have altered the terms of architectural practice,
they have, in turn, transformed assumptions about city planning and urban design. Reed suggests
a new structure for the comprehension of urbanization, one that acts â&#x20AC;&#x153;in terms that transcend the
limitations imposed by the static and utopian conceptualizations about the city and its products.â&#x20AC;?21

30

21

Reed: 5

3. The Work of Architecture in the Age of Globalization
The globalizing phenomenon has created a new set of conditions and constraints for
architecture. New users, new programs, and new experiences have shaped a “post-postmodern”
condition in which architecture is attempting to remake itself. Ibelings has termed this new
international architecture “Supermodernism”. The new archetype of the supermodern building uses
light construction and employs minimalist and monolithic formal characteristics. Graphic imagery
and surface treatment have become ubiquitous: the supermodern monuments are empty, flexible
shells covered in fancy wrappers. Yet the return to imagery, surface and even ornament functions
very differently from its use in Postmodern architecture. While Postmodernism argued for a return
to humanist values, Supermodernists purport a new realism—phenomenological and literal.
To say that designers are searching for an architecture
without symbolic or metaphorical allusions is not to
imply that there is no meaning at all anymore. Just that
the tendency of postmodernists and deconstructivists to
look for hidden meanings everywhere has become largely
superfluous for the simple reason that, more often than not,
there is no hidden meaning. In its place we now have a form
of meaning that is derived directly from how the architecture
looks, how it is used and, above all, how it is experienced.
After postmodernist and deconstructivist architecture, which
appealed primarily to intellect, a new architecture is evolving
which attaches greater importance to visual, spatial and
tactile sensation.22

In this sense, Jean Nouvel is a Supermodernist, Herzog and DeMeuron are Supermodernists, and
Frank Gehry is a Supermodernist.
22

Ibelings: 133

31

Ricola Storehouse, Herzog
and DeMeuron, 1993

HH Store, SANAA, 1999

32

53 W. 53rd St. Atelier
Jean Nouvel, 2007

33

Indeed, if there has been a paragon of globalized architecture, it is Gehry’s project in Bilbao.
Devoid of scalar intimation, tectonic legibility, and structural coherence, the Guggenheim is above
all a great, shining shell. All jubilant, iridescent surface and no programmatic constraint, Gehry’s
museum bears proof of architecture’s relevance in the globalized world. Rigorously a-contextual
and making no effort to reference the Basque or Spanish culture that sites it, it is an object building
par excellence. Most of the visitors probably don’t even notice the art inside, yet are content to
travel around the world simply to bask in the behemoth’s shadow. In an article for the New York
Times, Denny Lee finds that Bilbao has become a site of architectural pilgrimage, where most of the
devotees know nothing of the city besides the existence of the museum. The so-called “Bilbao effect”
denotes the idea that the dying industrial port of some 300,000 inhabitants was utterly revived by the
commission for a museum welcoming over a million visitors a year. According to Lee, “Bilbao, a
muscular town of steelworkers and engineers, is slowly becoming a more effete city of hotel clerks
and art collectors.”23 Yet, while the museum was by all accounts successful as an economic solution
to Bilbao’s confrontation with the post-industrial, globalized world, and is certainly illustrative of
a certain supermodern condition in the current design climate, questions remain as to whether the
project is in fact a healthy and sensible design solution. Should designers not build projects that rail
against the lifeless homogenization of this socio-cultural trending? Couldn’t one hope for more of a
dialogue between building and city as opposed to Gehry’s brazen soliloquy? In the end, has Gehry
helped himself more than he has helped the city of Bilbao?

34

23

Denny Lee “Bilbao, 10 years later,” The New York Times 23 September 2007 <http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/travel/23bilbao.html?pagewanted=2>

Plan, 3rd Floor

Exterior view, from
Southeast

35

And so, a new architecture has emerged, because a new global culture needs new types of
buildings. Program hardly exists in “high architecture” anymore; buildings are now just flexible
shells with ever-thinner envelopes. How does one shape a space to house the flow of ephemera?
People now sit in chairs; it is the electronic pulse, the swirl of new media, the rush of liquid money
that desires circulation.
Migration and dispersion represent new modes of population movement as the national
entity loses its ideological hold. The 21st century has already seen the rise of new allegiances. The
globalized citizen, the multi-national denizen and the global villager are metropolitan strangers; at
once highly individualistic and independent, the populace of what Reinhold Martin and Kadambari
Baxi call “resident aliens” is at the same time increasingly heterogeneous. These new masses consist
first and foremost of shoppers: consumerism purveys all aspects of culture. For Ibelings, “Urban
consumption takes many forms. In addition to the obvious types of consumption like shopping,
dining out, theatre- and museum-going, there is also a consumptive manner of looking…which
focuses selectively on the picturesque aspect of a village, on the historical buildings and urban
spaces of a city centre and on the unspoilt character of the landscape…”24 Architecture and built
form are now consumed and disposed of. Like a film or the ballet, it is a new form of spectacle that
is applauded or detested by a new form of audience.
On both an urban and building scale, globalization has brought the concepts of consumption and spectacle into increasing immediacy. Ardently theorized by Walter Benjamin in “The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in his Arcades Project, as well as by Baudelaire in
his conception of the modern flaneur, the mounting collusion between performance and both visual
and material consumption in today’s world has exaggerated the impact of their early studies. According to Erik Swyngedouw, the classically modern museum is described as an interiorized space
that framed and glassed in the object. It was a space where the happenstance encounter and the
public meeting were crystallized and frozen in time. In the new City of Spectacle this interior/exterior, public/private relationship is turned inside out. “The outside has now become itself part of the
24

36

Ibelings: 154

Ticket Counter,
Centre Pompidou

interiorized commodified spectacle.”25 The creation of new public and civic buildings that function
solely in terms of surface become simple set-pieces in a vast new stage-set city. In this presentation,
humans no longer have speaking parts, but become props and extras in an immense societal hoax.
Think of the Centre Pompidou, whose exposed, tubular stairways seem to conflate the movement
of people with the movement of heating, cooling, and water systems that move through the building’s colored pipes. Philosopher and critic Francesco Proto reads the Centre Pompidou as a cultural
supermarket: “A ticket there is bought not for a supermarket trolley full of Campbell’s soups and
Rice Crispies, but for an illusion: the illusion of having shared in the collective ritual of fun and
entertainment…”26
25
26

B. Shopping Spree
The recent work of OMA/Rem Koolhaas has explored issues of shopping and specatacle and public interaction in two notable projects:
the 1996 competition for the Luxor Theatre in Rotterdam and the 2002 Prada Store in SoHo, New York. Both works implicitly recognize
the reciprocal performative interaction between modern citizens, the globlalized event, and the hierarchies and affected distance inherent
to their juxtaposition. While programmatically different, Koolhaas exploits the modern circumstance to explore conditions where theater
and consumption are conflated.
For the Luxor Theatre, the designer employs material continuity in the form of a very long carpet and a flourishing spiral form, incorporating
multivalent functions along one continuous plane in attempts to subvert the hierarchy created by ticket prices and quality of view. The
Luxor section shows, however, that the projectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s innovation comes in the long portico and entrance foyer, because the seats are still, in
fact, hierarchically arranged. Although the goal is laudable, Koolhaas resorts to a formalist trick; and the result belies the conventionality of
the configuration. Further, the functionally derived necessity of viewing angles still results in a separation between audience and performed
spectacle.

As highlighted in the section above, the Luxor does not convincingly solve the problem of hierarchy.

The long, exposed atrium, is an important communal space, however.

38

Ironically, Koolhaasâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; solution for the upscale 2002
Prada store in SoHo, New York is more successful at
breaking down hierarchies between performer, performance, and consumer (both visual and material).
By combining display space for goods with seating
and the practical demands of trying on the high-end
shoes, the project breaks down the implicit barriers
between haute fashion and everyday use, and spectacle and audience. The blurred conditions between
lounge, store, and service further decentralize notions
of conventional spectatorship in the shopping arena.

39

The new global culture has bred new behavior, and architecture is being reprogrammed in
its unflappable wake. The programs of the modern world have nothing to do with those of the postpostmodern world. Martin and Baxi contend, “There is no such thing as a program; there is only
what actually happens.”27 And so, a new architecture has emerged, because new global experiences
require new architectural content.
Before, there was the inn, the tavern and the motel— places where weary travelers would
stop to rest after a long day on the road. Now there is the hotel—a huge mass that houses jet-setters
arriving from far-away nations they left only hours before. These new guests require refuge, a place
of peace and solace from the dynamic and foreign world outside. A hotel in Hong Kong can be the
same as a hotel in New York. It can serve the same food, provide the same beds, and show the same
television stations.
27

Before, there was the factory, the bank, and the store. Now there is the office building—a
glassy tower housing computers and telephones. The new workers require the ability to speak with
clients in other countries at the touch of a button, and to see real-time stock quotations across the
globe. An office building in London can be the same as an office building in Tokyo. It can be laid
out in the same way, harbor the same communication systems and never shut down. These are the
markers of the new global landscape, and they are increasingly similar.
Before there was the butcher shop, the bakery, and the farmer’s stalls at the village green.
Now there is the supermarket—a huge, sterile mass with endlessly repeating aisles, all filled with
processed, packaged foodstuffs from everywhere. The new shopper requires fixed prices, one stop
shopping, and endless choice. A supermarket in Paris can be the same as a supermarket in Dubai. It
can use the exact same signage, carry the exact same products, and accept the same credit cards.
The modern-day supermarket is symptomatic of a globalized, post-industrial suburban
landscape. Increasingly individualized experiences, today’s trip to the supermarket is highly impersonal and illustrative of the growing banality of the modern domestic.

41

C. Supermodernism means Supermarkets
The modern consumer experience is a highly individualized one, and the layout of the supermarket contributes to this phenomenon. As
shoppers move from the more public parking lot through one of a few entrances they are quickly dispersed along the product aisles and
into their own private experience with the store.
Most stores are similar in design and layout due to trends in marketing. Fresh produce tends to be located near the entrance of the store.
Milk, bread, and other essential staple items are usually situated toward the rear of the store and in other out-of-the-way places, purposely done to maximize the customer’s time spent in the store, strolling past other items and capitalizing on impulse buying. For security
purposes, the front of the store is the area where point of sale machines or cash registers are usually located, meaning customers leave
through the entrance doors and owner’s can easily monitor this highly controlled area.
As a result of this, the logic of most supermarkets’ spatial layouts leads to shopper inefficiency and loss of time, especially when the
consumer is only picking up a few goods. The system of trapping consumers along aisles favors those who do their week’s shopping all
at once . If the supermarket and hypermarkets are the shopping destinations of the new heterotopia, citizens of developing countries still
shop at local bazaars, souks and informal farmers’ markets. The stark difference in experiences is illustrative of contrasts between global
and local lifestyles.

Yuppie Bachelorette,
Two visits a week

25m

10m

Route

25m
10m

42

Purchase

Frat Boy,
Four (short) visits
a week

Housewife,
One visit every
eight days

While supermarket parking lots are often practical community gathering spaces
due to the sweeping necessity of grocery shopping across social boundaries,
the long, narrow aisles within the â&#x20AC;&#x153;big boxâ&#x20AC;? disperse the modern shopper, effectively estranging what in many parts of the world had been a communal
experience.

The Marsh Supermarket in Naperville, Illinois allows for a more natural shopping
experience by shortening aisles and arranging them in a radial array. Here,
shoppers are assured of coming into frequent contact with other members of
their neighborhood as they browse through the store.

43

4. Hysteric Preservation
Railing against the backdrop of radical changes in the design profession brought about by
globalization, historic preservation and renovation has more advocates than at any other time in the
movement’s history. A greater number of buildings are being preserved than ever before, and the
time we take to recognize that a building is representatively “historic” is becoming increasingly
shorter.28 Contemporary currents in preservationist theory have overwhelmingly recognized the
movement’s main goal as the marking of a building’s position in a historical field. By allowing it to
become a symbol of an earlier period—a captured moment in time—most preservationists’ primary
aim is the creation of a narrative that links an idea of the past to the present-day. Yet for architect
Rahul Mehrotra, who has completed several preservation and adaptive re-use projects in India, this
discourse is limiting in that it “perpetuates a nostalgia driven motivation to preserve…”29
Inherent in this problem is preservationists’ fetishization of the historical and cultural
artifact. When left to these devices, conservation focuses much too narrowly on the creation of a
precious object. The materialist focus of contemporary preservationist ideology should be noted
in the context of globalization and its implications on history and the global environment. For
architect Juhani Pallasmaa, “the deep problem with today’s globalized culture is its very experiential

44

28
29

For an example of this see Koolhaas’ Maison à Bordeaux which was slated to become a historic monument only six years after its completion.
Rahul Mehrotra, “Conservation and Change: Questions for Conservation Education in Urban India,” Built Environment November 2007: 349

and emotional shallowness—its lack of the aura of the real.”30 While the temptation to guard
the concrete nature of embodied histories in light of these changing conditions can, perhaps, be
understood, the notion of securing every scrap of a pristine past in an air-tight vacuum should be
regarded suspiciously. It is too similar to the septuagenarian who tightly clutches his typewriter
as his colleagues switch to computers. It is also very similar to the old-guard Regionalists, who
clung to historic referents in their desire to preserve national and political identity in the face of
industrialization. Like the Historic Regionalists of the late 19th century, today’s conservationists
must instill a sense of criticality into their discourse. It is myopic to understand architecture solely in
terms of a building’s appearance on the day it was completed. Architecture represents and achieves
much more than this in the way it changes ideas of use, shifts our understanding of place, and is
complicit in forming cultural and collective memories.
30

Juhanni Pallasamaa, “On History and Culture,” Architectural Record June 2007: 105

Shakespeare Country park,
Maruyama, Japan, 1997

45

5. Local Notions

Like their counterparts in the preservation movement, anthropologists and designers
have viewed the onset of the supermodern condition as a moment of crisis within their respective
disciplines. As the homey lamplight of local cultures begins to fade in the wash of the globalized
world’s dazzling new monuments to the modern, scholars have renewed the debate over local culture
and Regionalist values. It is a case of history repeating itself. Just as the Regionalist movement
arose to counter Modernism’s threat to the heterogeneous and personal in architecture, contemporary
society suddenly seems frightened of the potential loss as local identity and meaning teeter on the
brink of eradication.
Anthropologist Marc Augé makes a clear distinction between space and place in this
new world. Contrary to space, place in Augé’s anthropological view is created as a result of the
presence of human action. Space, then, is wasteland: indicative of the new, global condition. He
has dubbed these soulless zones ‘non places’, areas of transience and impermanence, devoid of
human interaction and societal meaning. These are locales of the new globalized building type and
are, for Augé, defined by high degrees of both mobility and consumption. An intense hesitance, one
that often borders on cynicism, in accepting the modern-day condition can be seen in much of the
contemporary anthropological writing. Global scholars Manuel Castells and Arjun Appadurai are

46

47

pragmatic in their view of the new givens—arguing for a more nuanced approach to the bewildering
rate of societal change. Castells’ supports the idea of a ‘new tribalism’. He writes,
A requirement of this counteroffensive is “the development
of an architecture that tries to say something—not one
that directly expresses society; no serious architecture has
ever done that—but one that incorporates the debates, the
values, the moving cultural dynamics of society into spatial
forms, thus rejecting the new orthodoxy that has substituted
modernism with postmodernism, with the uniform
architecture of the space of flows…[the new architectures]
must introduce a new tension between individual creation
and collective cultural expressions in order to reconstruct
meaning in our environment.31

While Castells echoes Augé’s yearning for a return of meaning in the globalized world, Appadurai’s
characterization is even more specific, tying the idea of meaning to a sense of the ‘local’. In his essay
31

Illusion of Permanence, Appadurai sees the rise of new disjunctures as the crux of global development.
Society, he says, is schizophrenic, contradictory and undergoing a crisis of temporariness. Constant
anxiety arises from the evolving tensions set out by the rapidly-changing, global environment. He
contends that designers must instill a sense of place created by a feeling of locality as a foil to
globalization’s persistent attempts to normalize the urban ecosystem. For architects and planners, the
concept of locality and the production of the consequences in which it would arise—an idea which
which seems is second-nature and taken for granted—must be considered and designed. In the end,
“for mere spatiality to take its form, there has to be an effort, a ‘production of locality,’ which is
much more complex.” This is not an attempt to substitute or subsume the original locality, but rather
to enhance and complicate the idea of locality at its root.32
Interestingly, the work of global and cultural anthropologists has reactivated dialogues
about Regionalism within the architectural discourse. As Supermodernist designers have discarded
the pastiche elements of postmodern reference, and Schmarsow’s vision of cultural identity through
architecture once again fades, new scholars and practitioners have once again rallied to its theoretical basis. Recognizing the renewed peril of the state of local and cultural character, a new Critical
Regionalism for the 21st century has evolved. Mobilizing and reconceptualizing Tzonis, Lefaivre,
and Frampton in global terms, this new dialogue hopes to preserve a sense of architecture’s capacity
for linking built form to humanity. If we understand the early movement’s work as a recognition of
local contexts that needed to be regarded and applied to design practice critically, Barbara Allen, in
her essay On Performative Regionalism, argues that Tzonis et al. did not go far enough. While issues like program, form, ornament, and tectonics were seen to shape integral parts of regional identities, the movement failed to identify the importance of the “spatial dimensions of people’s practices
and normative behaviors.”33 The importance of cultural performance as a regionalist context had
been ignored. How we dress, what we eat, and the way we shop are powerful drivers of a shared,
communal memory and have vital impact on the way we use and interact with our built environment.

As Allen argues, designers must produce a sense of Appadurai’s “place” by exploiting architecture’s
agency to enact shared tradition, ritual and cultural practice.
Architecture has the capacity to enforce this trend. Authentic forms of cultural performance participate in the forming of communal memory and, subsequently, a collective identity.
Barbara Allen’s emphasis on the potential of performance-based, regional practice in the production
of locality is vital to understanding this. Like Swyngedouw, Neal Leach sees architecture’s complicity in social performance, albeit more optimistically: He makes the argument that since “identity” is a performative construct…then architecture could be understood as a ‘film set’…that derives
its meanings from the activities that have taken place there. “Through our performances”, he writes
“we belong to a culture based on similarly performed identities and these are often acted out on a
certain architectural stage engendering an attachment to a particular place or (micro)region.”34

50

34

Neal Leach qtd. in Allen: 423

D. The Performance of Purchase

Indian markets are engaging case studies in terms of the display of goods, the inventive use of space and material, and their ability to be
deployed as flexible and mobile units. In addition, the varied configurations create different levels of hierarchy, distance, and interaction
between sellers and shoppers.

Permanent in nature, this stall
configuration gives the vendor
the dominant position above the
customer in section. It is also
highly convenient and easy to
monitor goods.
The food vendor typically employs
an inventive cart that houses both
storage of raw goods, cooking
mechanism and a power supply.
The system is highly mobile,
sensorily interactive, and allows the
customer to survey the preparation
of food.

Merchants selling from the ground
take up little space and require
very little material. Their positioning
allows customers to make
demands on high or requires them
to squat to communicate.

The two-sided shop is highly
secure and practical in terms of
storage. The table separating
customer and grocer could be
seen as a convenience for the
laying out of goods or a barrier
between the parties.

A hybrid between the sidewalk
merchant and the open stall,
this configuration is ingenious
in that it recyles empty goods
containers to allow for the display
of merchandise.

The three-sided stall is the most
secure of the various systems, but
requires the most permanent and
formal intervention. Again, there is
a trade-off between practicality and
vendor/customer dissociation.

51

In an effort to understand what is essentially local, contemporary theorists have furthered
the Critical Regionalist’s manifesto by imposing the necessity of “authenticity” into the movement’s
recognized contexts, contending that it should be a central tenant of Regionalist theory. For Vincent
Canizaro, “authenticity is a quality of engagement between people and things or people and places.
It is not a property inherent to things or places but a measure of our connection to them.”35 In mining
new processes of urbanization in the global city, Stephen Reed remembers Jane Jacobs’ comment
that “there is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness and disorder [in the urban environment]…
the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is
struggling to exist and to be served.”36 It is important to realize that, even in Jacobs’ time, ideas about
local culture and authenticity existed within the cityscape. Now, however, supermodern urbanity is
rife with both Augé’s “non-places” and territorial boundaries between polarized urban formats.
For this reason, both Allen and Canizaro’s claims seem conservative in their hesitance
to place Critical Regional theory in more overtly modern contexts. Local and regional practices
have changed the very nature in which people enact culture. A trip to the well to gossip and fetch
water has turned into a trip to the study to chat on the computer; pick-up basketball with friends
has become real-time on-line video gaming played across the ether; a meal shared with family at
the dinner table has turned into a bag of fast food devoured in front of the television. Moreover, it
would be overly simplistic if the new Critical Regionalists’ idea of “local” was relegated purely to a
wholesome sense of community that acted as a protective cushion or refuge for the estranged global
bourgeoisie. According to Reed, “People need to participate in the dynamics of change, and they
need to participate through places (both virtual and ‘physical’…) situated within and energized by a
non-local space which is open, connected to streams of urban, regional and global power while not
being controlled by them.”37

52

35
36
37

Canizaro: 26
Reed: 10
ibid.

As noted by Castells, it is precisely the hybrid nature of the supermodern problem that
will help bring about productive dialectical restructuration of new cultural meanings. Plumbing the
liminal regions between schismatic urban developments of the globalized age can lead designers to
rich new uses of space and new forms of urban event. Reed writes, â&#x20AC;&#x153;It is often [the incongruous,
shadowy, spaces of the contemporary city] which shout to us about the potentials of the urban, of
an environment which is open to shifting valences, to expedient and practical appropriation, and
to an unprogrammed and unpredictable vitality.â&#x20AC;?38 It is on the battleground of the global city that
confrontations between formal and informal, local and universal, authentic and totalizing will come
to a head. New authenticities, in which exist a recognition and revalorization of both the global and
local conditions, must arise through dynamic difference and tensions.

38

ibid: 7

53

6. Would You Like Fries with Your Maharaja Burger?
As the popular saying goes, human beings only require three things in life: food, clothing
and shelter. As the contemporary climate changes ideas about the design and preservation of shelter,
societal conceptions of culture and identity are transformed. The same could be said for food,
which shares tacit links to memory, meaning and social self-conception. Comparisons between
the design, construction and reception of architectural works share deep resonances with the way
that we purchase, cook, and consume food. One can feel equally comfortable speaking of balance,
measure, proportion, sensuality, and aesthetics whether discussing architecture or dinner. As a result
of this, debates within the architectural discourse would seem to mirror those within the world of
gastronomy. Architect Gion Caminada has spoken about economies driven by material factors
and building technique in terms of food preparation. When using low-cost materials in innovative
ways, he writes, “Value is added because of the special nature of the treatment. The same is true of
cooking, when you cook something tasty with ingredients prepared on the spot, instead of opening
a ready meal in a well-travelled tin. The strategy of enhancing a reasonably priced native material
through a high degree of processing presents a meaningful challenge in terms of planning as well.”39
Similarly, questions about material honesty in building design can be associated with those in the

culinary realm: should wood always look and perform like wood, and should strawberries always
taste and act like strawberries? Swiss architect Annette Gigon has compared the addition of paint in
her design work to the chef’s addition of spice in a dish: “You add a little and it changes the nature
of the building.”40
Issues of local authenticity, which are so important in the present era, involve food as
significantly as they involve architecture. Like architecture, cooking has traditionally been a
regional practice. Designers specified local building materials and hired workers from the region,
in the same way that shopping and cooking were always done with respect to what was easily and
locally available. While increasingly less so today, food and building still incorporate regional
modes of practice to some extent. Taste and style can also be seen as traditionally regional concepts
within both frameworks. Palates have been scientifically proven to vary geographically; the same
might be said of architecture where color, ornament and detail contrast by region. Traditional
practice and religious belief which function primarily at regional levels can be seen as an important
link between food and architecture’s functioning at the local level in efforts to create authenticity.
Anthropologists Whidney Mintz and Christine DuBois write, “Ethnographers have found multiple
entry points for the study of how humans connect food to rituals, symbols, and belief systems. Food
is used to comment on the sacred and to reenact venerated stories. In consecrated contexts, food
‘binds’ people to their faiths through powerful links between food and memory. Sometimes the food
itself is sacred through its association with supernatural beings and processes…”41
Still, globalization’s blanketing effects have changed the way societies both consume
and conceive of their nourishment for better and worse. The same phenomena of proliferation
and dispersion that have affected architectural practice have considerably changed the networks
of food’s transportation and availability. In much the same way that the world’s built environment
has succumbed to Disneyfication, the world’s palate has fallen to McDonaldization. The global
populace has begun to eat as America eats, and nations that pride themselves on their gustatory

capabilities have protested mightily. Locavores and Slow Food advocates have reacted to these
changes by boycotting and even bombing certain imported chain restaurants. At the same time, the
transformation and liberalization of traditional foodways through globalization has connected the
world through cuisine. This has allowed the Mumbaiker, for the first time, to savour an aged French
Camembert from Normandy and the Parisian to sample an Indian Alphonso Mango from Pune. In
this way, shopping and eating as collective practices and sites of communal memory have begun to
transcend geographic limitations.

57

E. Stall vs. Mall

58

As with architecture, conflicts between the local and global in the anthropology of food
have enriched our understanding of the modern condition. Food, in this framework, should be
seen both as a seminal piece in constructing notions of identity, as well as a resulting construction
of these notions. Roland Barthes has theorized this idea in his essay, Toward a Psychosociology of
Contemporary Food Consumption. In it, he writes that food plays an important role in cultural selfimagination through ties to both memory and habit.
Food permits a person to partake, each day, of the national
past. In this case, this historical quality is obviously linked
to food techniques. These have long roots, reach back to
the depth of the [past]. They are, we are told, the repository
of a whole experience, of the accumulated wisdom of our
ancestors…No doubt the myth of [a nation’s cooking] abroad
(or as expressed to foreigners) strengthens this “nostalgic”
value of food considerably. But since the [nation’s citizens,
themselves,] actively participate in this myth, it is fair to
say that through his food, the citizen experiences a certain
national continuity.42

In addition to the daily act of eating, Appadurai has written about the cookbook as a means of
capturing ideas about communal self-significance: through the conglomeration of regions and careful
codification with respect to taste and ingredients, cookbooks can become powerful, embodied texts
that speak for an entire nation.43
Cookbooks, then, can be seen as one way in which tensions between global and local
work to create useful syntheses with respect to societal meaning. In India, specifically, restaurants
have become increasingly important venues for such productive phenomena, as different groups
from different backgrounds with different beliefs share one dining room to partake in the culturally
significant practice of eating, thereby forming and transforming a single collective memory. The
Indian marketplace is even better arena for this syncretic creation, in that the basic daily necessities
of shopping require these various groups to congregate in one space to purchase their daily needs.
Here the modern citizen is surrounded by regional Indian produce, exotic global imports, and

42
43

Roland Barthes “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption,” Food And Culture: A Reader Ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (Routledge: New York) 2008: 24
Appadurai, How To Make a National Cuisine: 22

59

foods that are taboo in certain religions while beloved by others. The Indian market’s ability to
bring people of varying religion, age, class, and lifestyle, together, is testimony to its functional
importance in the production of collective identity. And as our notions about food change, so do our
ideas about the built environment. Arjun Appadurai notes that “leftovers are an extremely sensitive
category in traditional Hindu thought, and though in certain circumstances they are seen as positively
transvalued, most often the eating of leftovers or wastes carries the risk of moral degradation…
and loss of status.”44 Yet, new cooking shows and cookbooks in Indian society have begun to
revalorize the leftovers, showing the modern Indian how to transform and reuse last night’s odds
and ends to create something delicious and altogether new. In a similar way, important advances in
historic preservation efforts are reflective of the Indian nation’s new attitudes towards old buildings.
Victorian-era monuments, like Madame Singh’s leftover curry, can become something altogether
pleasing and satisfying through inventive design and the addition of a little spice.
44

60

Arjun Appadurai “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History January 1988: 8

F. Community Consumption
The Indian marketplace, in catering to the multifarious communities embedded within it, reflects the differences and intersections inherent
to an implied regional identity. By better understanding the contexts that make up these local elements, designers can exploit cultural and
religious tastes and necessities as spatial configurations in order to better foster community within the experience of shopping.

Non-Religious

Devout Muslim

Devout Hindu

Parsi

Christian

61

7. Adaptive Re(f)use
Many of the voices in today’s preservation movement call for conservation efforts to
reestablish within the building the contexts that existed during their construction. Juhani Pallasmaa
writes, “The restoration of any building poses ethical, philosophical, and technical problems,
beginning with the idea of the preconceived interdependence of form and function. What is the
architectural validity of a functionalist building that has been given a new function?”45 Pallasmaa’s
position is untenable: he at once calls for a renewed authenticity, while at the same time favoring
simple restorations over innovative adaptations.

Colonial Williamsburg, which visionary

preservationist James Marston Fitch denounced in the 1970’s, is an example of how specious such
architectural acts really are. According to Jorge Otero-Pailos, editor of Columbia University’s
periodical on preservation, Future Anterior, “The entire town had been returned to 1776 through
surgical demolitions and scientific reconstructions, then furnished and perpetually maintained in
first-class condition. The archaeological operations to ‘purify and telescope historic processes’
presented visitors with a ‘simultaneity of well-being that would seldom if ever have occurred.’
The experience distanced life from the past instead of bringing it closer.”46 When projects like
this are designed today, they sponsor an implicit misunderstanding of the contemporary condition.

The users of buildings have changed, and uses of buildings have changed with them. Culture and
identity are significantly different in today’s world than even twenty years ago, and dramatic shifts
in cultural practice reflect this. When preservationists neglects these facts, what should be a vital act
of preservation becomes simple reconstruction, and what could be useful and evocative buildings
become distant and affected museums.
As noted, dialogues within the preservationist movement mirror the evolution of Regionalist
theory in the 20th century. Theorists and practitioners like Otero-Pailos and Mehrotra occupy similar
roles in preservation to those of Frampton and Allen within the Regionalist debate. Arguing for a less
overtly conservative approach to such issues, these new voices call for less object-oriented modes of
preservation, seeking instead to preserve the ideas, cultural phenomena, and innovation embodied
in historic works of architecture. In Koolhaas’ terms, “we are always thinking about preserving
physical substance, but in certain circumstances, it is more valuable to think about preserving ways
of life or the ‘non exceptional.’”47 In this manner, preservation becomes less about the restoration
of a historic veneer and more focused on the defense of authentic cultural practice and manners
of habitation, thereby establishing authenticity and rooted notions of the local at a more essential
level.
In addition to current preservationist’s attitudes being overly object-driven, the discourse’s
focus on the creation of a narrative continuum between the past and the present implies a narrow and
outdated view of history itself. Such linear conceptions of the historical record turn the past into a
deceased document, written in stone and thoroughly immobile. It is, perhaps, the Modernists who
are to blame for this, since it was in their interest, as a self-imagined movement that captured cultural
zeitgeist and zoomed to the future, to portray history as a stable, unchanging context that contrasted
starkly with their mode of practice. The best works of preservation today do not succumb to this
fallacy, however, instead allowing history to become an evolving current, one that changes in relation
to a volatile present. For Pailos, “historic preservation, is in fact, a productive force, relentlessly
47

generative of new and ever-expanding categories dedicated to reordering the fundamental codes of
culture in terms of history.â&#x20AC;?48 Projects that recognize this, transform historic buildings into openended texts where a multiplicity of meanings are alternately revealed and obscured in an effort to
productively complicate a userâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reading of both history and cultural identity with respect to built
forms of the past.
The supermodern condition is one of constant ebbs and flows, new paradigms and
conventional paradoxes. Any architectural discourse in these times must recognize the vast and
conflicting forces at work in this new world: global and local, kinetic and static, material and act.
Society struggles to establish the terms of its identity and authenticity amidst this confusion. As
historic preservation cannot escape the inexorable hybridity that structures this climate, the terms by
which we understand past and present are implicitly engaged in our search for meaning.

48

64

Pailos: iii

Caixa Forum, Herzog and
Pierre DeMeuron, 2008

Art Center College of
Design. Daly Genik, 2004

65

G. Case: Mercat D’Santa Caterina
2005. EMBT architects. 5,500 sm

Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue’s adaptive reuse of the 170 year old Santa Caterina Market has both transformed the once dilapitated structure into an emblematic building, and resurrected the gritty Ciutat Vella neighborhood which it occupies. While the colorful
ceramic tile roof is certainly striking, the market is an effective intervention because of the way that Miralles and Tagliabue recognize the
urban condition in Barcelona’s Gothic quarter. The market is developed as public space. Exceedingly open and communal in nature, Santa
Caterina is designed to function as a void that opens off of the narrow streets and dense four- and five-story surroundings. To acheive this
affect the market’s plan, in sharp contrast to modern big box supermarkets, is extraordinarily open from all sides, and the small urban plaza
created at the neighborhood end is sucked into the market’s space through path figures and material choices.

66

The lively, figural roof is detailed so as to sit lightly on the reused marketâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s orthoganal envelope--a flying carpet that shelters the newly
created town plaza. Implicit in the recognition of the market as a plaza is the valorization of shopping and food-selling as a community
activity. The plan houses space for stalls as well as a supermarket, and even though one might be buying goods from around the globe,
EMBT assures us that it will be done in an essentially local setting.

67

The building is certainly an eye-catching supermodernist object building along the lines of Gehry’s Bilbao, yet the building’s legible tectonics and sensitivity to local site conditions makes the design effectively ‘glocal’ in a way that the post-post modern generally tries to magic
away. EMBT decided to reuse as much of the existing market as possible, even employing the original wood framing as a highly visible
roof support and a whimsical referent. The original facades are maintained underneath the new roof and the contrast between stolid
and playful enriches the market’s various entrances. The designer‘s attitude towards history and preservation can also be attributed to
the success of the market’s ability to negotiate the terrain between forward-looking globalized architecture and nostalgic preservation. In
Tagliabue’s words: “Call it a hybrid if you like, but we think its logical if you want to get beyond thinking neatly in terms of black and white
all the time. It’s multiplying material and multiplying kinds of time: present time contains past time without erasing it, opening the way to a
range of possibilities, a multiplication of meanings. Architecture shouldn’t insist on the permanence of any particular moment; in a manner
of speaking, it should try to inhabit time. Our belief is that this approach generates a new way of working on the urban fabric in which it’s
difficult to distinguish between rehabilitation and new building...” 1

1

68

Fulvio Irace, “Mercat D’Santa Caterina” Abitare October 2005: 168-170

69

Kalbadevi,

Mumbai,
1930’s

8. Mini/Maxi/OptiMumbai
While the Indian nation is seeing the consequences of globalization for the first time,
Mumbai has, in many senses, been a global city for centuries. Having begun as a small fishing
village, occupied by the Portuguese and then the British in the 17th century, Bombay might not exist
today but for the development brought about by its colonial “oppressors”. As keenly noted by Aromar
Revi, “the East India Company can be thought of as the world’s first true Transnational Company,
symptomatic of a globalized economy.”49 By the late 19th century, Bombay had been almost fully
converted from a traditional trading town with an agrarian economy into all-out manufacturing
hub. As added proof of its importance in an increasingly linked global community, the city was
deeply affected by further British annexation of the Sub-continent (which allowed for overland
routes between Bombay and London), and the opening of a sea-route through the Suez Canal. The
consequences of the American revolution were perhaps most important during this period, for as the
industrial cotton ports in the American South closed during the war, Bombay became the British’s
main source of textile goods. As Mehrotra points out,
By the 1850’s Bombay was a mixture of cultures and

was already becoming distinct from the other colonial
or traditional urban settlements in India. It was quickly
acquiring a cosmopolitan spirit and its ‘stable’ population was
fast increasing. During his Governorship from 1853-1860,
Lord Elphinstone made a pertinent observation. He noted
that the leading commercial classes in Bombay had no real
social influence outside the island, and that the manner of life
made it unlikely that they would have any particular interest
in native culture for its own sake. This made them ‘urban’
people with a definite stake in the future of the town.50

The issue of identity in modern Mumbai is one that is therefore richer and more complex than in any
other Indian city. One might very well wonder whether Mumbai requires a more political mode of
self-representation or should rather push to realize its potentials a new global capital.

50

Mehrotra, Rahul Bombay: The Cities Within (Bombay: Indian Book House) 1995: 51

71

Mumbai is, by all accounts, one of the great cities in the world. With its population of
almost 18 million, if Mumbai were in fact a country, it would rank 54th out of 173.51 With a population
density of almost 42,000 people per square kilometer, Mumbai ranks first in this category among the
large cities of the world. The writer Suketu Mehta sees Mumbai as a series of conflicts over space:
a vast populace and temporal shanties muscling for position with gridlocked automobiles and shiny
apartment buildings.52 Mumbai is a city in motion, and it has been since its conception. An urban
terrain that was literally fabricated through the connection of seven distinct islands, the city has
resisted both controlled planning efforts and economic subventions. It is a laissez-faire town with a
survival-of-the-fittest attitude, and its urban fabric reflects this nature. According to Mehrotra, who
lives and practices there,
In spite the transforming state of the metropolis, there are
fragments from the past that still exert a presence on Bombay’s
urban landscape—fragments that continue to express and
represent the ideals and processes that created them. In fact,
this palimpsest quality where each explicit layer can be read
simultaneously is what distinguishes Bombay from other
cities which were based on pre-determined master plans.
Bombay on the other hand grew incrementally with many
layers added to the core land mass…53

Despite similarities in size, population and density, it laminated conception of Mumbai that makes
it different from other Indian metropolises. While cities as dissimilar as Delhi and Chandigarh
still represent power through determined planning and their organization of urban mass and void,
Mumbai seems to find order in its constant renewal and reorganization. It is for this reason an
exhausting and ecstatic illustration of the new third-world, globalized, urban paradigm.
In much the same way that one can see Mumbai’s contemporary organization in terms of
its past, modern Mumbai’s cultural identity is an intrinsic reflection of its origins. Bombay was a
town built on the foundations of commerce, trade, and capital, and Mumbai today remains so. In
the words of Mehta: “Bombay is all about transaction—dhanda. It was founded as a trading city,

built at the entrance to the rest of the world, and everybody was welcome as long as they wanted to
trade.”54 While the Indian nation has its roots in an agrarian past, Mumbai has forever stood alone
as a town where goods and money changed hands. The 1990’s saw Bombay’s airports accounting
for over 75% of India’s imported goods and 60% of those exported. The Bombay Stock Exchange
created important growth in India’s financial sector, postitvely effecting external investment in the
nation’s communication industry, real estate, and service oriented future55. Although the Indian cities of Bangalore and Hyderabad have become more well-known as the Indian Silicon Valleys, built
out of IT parks and global call centers, Mumbai still houses more of these service campuses than
any other Indian city.
The ideas of spectacle and capital overlap in modern Mumbai as nowhere else in the world.
Founded on trade and money, the city has become home to the world’s largest film industry. Bollywood produces more films and generates more ticket sales revenue than any other. For film
critic Irene Bignardi, “some words become even bigger than the thing they refer to. Bollywood
is one such case. “[It] instantly conjures up a particular idea of Indian cinema—a good two hours
of colourful entertainment, a love triangle, at least six musical numbers, lavish costumes, beautiful women and (not quite so attractive) men.”56 This conception of pure spectacle is knotted up in
its city’s imagination. Besides driving aesthetic fashions in color, style, and music, the industry is
capable of uniting Mumbai’s populace, young and old, rich and poor, as nothing else can.
54
55
56

The conglomeration of functions, services and developments give Mumbai a unique form.
“It is as if, to use American examples, Mumbai combines, at the one and same time, the tightly
packed island of New York City along with the silicon corridor of San Francisco and Palo Alto,
to which is added part of the spread of Los Angeles…”57 At the same time, the city’s denizens, or
Mumbaikers as they are often called, thrive on the spirit of consumption. Nowhere in India can one
find the same staggering numbers of nightclubs, street food vendors, cinemas, and retail outlets. The
city is a machine that guzzles up and spits out rupees like nowhere else on the subcontinent.

Yet, despite a seeming confidence in its globalized pedigree, Mumbai faces a 21st century

identity crisis. Regionalist politics and culture have created new sources of local pride as well as
tension in the city, and Mumbai’s home state of Maharashtra has begun to forcefully remind the
city of its ties to the province. This is clearly seen in the Maharashtra based Shiv Sena party’s
rise to power in the 1995 elections. It is the Shiv Sena party that was primarily responsible for
the city’s name change from Bombay to Mumbai that same year. In the wake of the election,
many of the city’s civic buildings and streets were renamed, in a sense erasing the history of the
British rule and replacing it with a far more region- and nation-based representation. Many of these
buildings, including the prominent Victoria Terminus railway station as well as Mumbai’s airport,
were renamed after the Maharashtrian king, Shivaji, who founded the state and clashed with Mughal
ruler in the 1600’s. In addition, colonial-era statues placed in important locations were exchanged
for those of the ancient ruler. The Shiv Sena party, named for the king, claims to draw inspiration
from the figure as well. Ideologically and culturally, the official name change has had a huge impact
on Mumbai’s conception of self. In effect, the destructive aspect of the policy is clearly seen in the
way that it has shifted the diverse ethnic and cultural cosmopolitanism fostered throughout the city’s
history to one more oriented towards indigenous, populist and religious tendencies.
Further, Mumbai is tied administratively to the state, and policy and planning specific
to the city are enacted by the state government. This issue has led to bureaucratic backlogs and

subsequent frustration from many of the city’s planners and development agencies in their efforts
to exact positive change within the greater metropolitan area. For urbanist Jim Masselos, “it is thus
also distinguished from other cities in India, in that it articulates the characteristics of its region.”58
At the beginning of the new century, then, Mumbai has apparently been embedded within its region
in ways that other great cities of the world are not.
Still, Mumbai maintains certain characteristics that define it as a truly Indian city. Its talent
for harboring differences in belief, tradition, and practice are couched in its national heritage. While
the city’s diverse populations, even today, continue to live in a segregated patchwork of settlement
and slum, it is in Mumbai’s civic and communal spaces—the maidans used for sport and strolling,
the crowded bazaars and market places, and the vast train and tram systems used by a staggering 6
million people daily—that one finds India’s syncretic genius.
58

76

ibid: 104

The city, then, becomes impossible to characterize: at once a global prototype, mixed with a
national paradigm, tied up in a regional city-state mold. It is as a result of these many incredible forces
that Mumbai—and both the new and old buildings that compose its structure—can be considered
such an important and fertile testing ground for dialogues about locality and hypermodernity. A
hybridized and conflicted city, modern day Mumbai is a climate ripe for dialectical discovery and
instantiation. Mehrotra has described its condition as two cities compressed into one world. Within
this framework, he distinguishes the pukka or cooked city—formally planned, materially permanent
and solid, and monumental—from the kuchha or raw one.59
Pukka Mumbai’s character is acknowledged in the monumental and planned aspects
of Southern Mumbai’s Fort district: imposing and monumental stone buildings are an ordered
framework that, despite political efforts, still evokes the city’s historical heritage in a distinctly
cosmopolitan way. The district’s programmatic contents reflect this personality—government
buildings, universities, museums in the area are punctuated with fountains and framed around parks.
The economic district around Cuffe Parade, although not nearly as well planned, and the Art Deco
buildings lining the Emerald Necklace also reflect the pukka in modern Mumbai. These permanent
structures and their imposing nature on the urban fabric have embedded themselves in the city’s
spirit and notion of selfhood. They exist, architecturally, as Rossi-an vessels of memory—captured
in stone— by the very fact of their persistence in the city’s life.
It is this kinetic city that, since Mumbai’s conception, has challenged designers and
architects. It is the city of Mumbai’s bazaars, train stations, and slums that give both a dynamic and
chaotic feel to the metropolis. It is embodied in Mehta’s notion of Mumbai as a constant struggle for
livelihood—wherever an opportunity exists for profit or establishment, Mumbai’s kinetic element
works to newly invent and optimize a space for it, like water seeping into cracks. The kuchha does
not simply connote poverty, but rather the fluid and flexible aspect of modern day Mumbai. The
identity of the kinetic city is, by nature, materially ephemeral. Memory and culture are not wrapped

H. The North Fort Area
The creation of Elphinstone (now Horniman) Circle (1) in 1864 was used by town planners as an opportunity to set up a formal East-West
axis from the town centre. This axis ran from the Town Hall on the eastern edge through the Circle up to the extension of Churchgate Street
(2) on the islandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s western side. This axis across the island was counteracted by a North-South polarity between Victoria Terminus (3) and
the Gateway of India (4). Flora Fountain can then be read as a marking of the intersection of these axes (5).1
In the early 1900â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Sydenham Road (now Mohammed Ali Road) was created along the eastern edge of the island to open access from
the Fort District in the South to developing areas in the North. The avenue connected Byculla Bridge and Crawford Market (6), which sits
at the extension of the previously created axis system.2

up in the tarps and tents of Mumbai’s slum dwellings and informal markets, but rather in their
mode of existence. It is in its pure talent for improvisation and existence that we find the kinetic
city’s authentic culture. Indeed, the kinetic city differs from the static in that architecture is not the
spectacle of the city in Mumbai. It is, rather, festival and tradition that mobilize the population.
Here, ritual is the vessel of memory; it exists temporally and can be built up and taken down like the
migrant worker’s makeshift hut. In this sense, memory and meaning are elastic and enacted; they
are activated by tradition.60
The city’s severe lack of gathering and green areas leads to incredible programmatic, cultural,
and temporal juxtapositions between the two facets of Mumbai’s world, and this is seen, to use
Mehrotra’s examples, in the way that informal merchants inhabit Victorian arcades or cricket pitches
are transformed into formal reception spaces over the course of a day.61 An understanding of the
existence and overlapping of these conditions has an important impact on the analysis of implication
of globalized and localized identities within the context of Mumbai. For architects and designers,
capturing and mobilizing the locally authentic in Mumbai’s kuchha is the obvious challenge. How
does one architecturalize the fleeting? Can one make space that energizes a temporally existing
culture? Eventually, it is Barbara Allen’s demand for a recognition of the performative aspects
of Critical Regional thought, that would provide a soluble recourse. N. Panjwani, writes, that in
Mumbai’s market places, “Form is often more important than content. The rustic form in which
sacks of red chilies are displayed in the market serves, subconsciously, to make the [village-born]
resident feel at home.”62 As seen here, it is the authenticity and performance of cultural practice that
fosters the local in Mumbai’s kinetic realm. The modern designer must account for and allow the
possibility of such performance in their efforts to revalorize the ethereal nature of today’s problems.
According to Reed, “as far as designers and planners are concerned today, the lesson may be one of
understanding the problem in terms of a less superficial, less pictorial, perhaps less object-oriented
and certainly more process-oriented, comprehension of the condition of the urban and of urban
place.”63
60
61
62
63

Still, merely understanding the qualities of Mumbaiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s disparate identities is insufficient.
Mumbai finds itself a globalized city in a global world. The consequences of this sea-change in the
cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s urban climate have forced the kinetic and static facets into a previously unimagined confluence.
The static city can no longer, as has happened in the past, overlook the presence of the kinetic. For
Mehrotra, this failure has resulted in the city densifying in the same space, rather than diversifying
into more vibrant modes.64 As discussed, it is only in the harvesting of productive tensions between
these hybrid conditions, that architecture can once again fruitfully impact cultural habitation and
coexistence.

64

82

Mehrotra et al., Two Cities, One World

9. Conclusions
The discipline of architecture is at a crossroads. As political, economic, cultural and social
circumstances have been transformed in the face of global upheaval, complacent design will become
irrelevant design. The arrival of the supermodern condition has rapidly implicated the contemporary
built environment and has severely shifted the currents of present discourse. Programs, contexts,
regions, and clients no longer represent what they once did. If the world needs architecture, and the
world has changed, then architecture must change as well.
Mumbai is at a crossroads. As new global circumstances clash with regional politics and
dynamic economic change alters the communal order, complacent cities will become irrelevant
cities. The new globalized era has brought unimagined density and inconceivable juxtapositions
to the metropolitan order, disproving prior preconceptions about the mode in which city planning,
urban design, and the built artifact affect the outcomes of the urban situation. Zoning, regulations,
neighborhoods, and citizens no longer represent what they once did. If the world needs cities, and
the world has changed, then cities must change as well.

83

Crawford Market stands at the crossroads of many paths. Literally so, in that it occupies a
busy and important intersection, but conceptually as well. Built in 1869 and named after the city’s
first Municipal Commissioner, the building was, like many of Mumbai’s other civic and symbolic
buildings, renamed for Mahatma Jyotirao, a regional social activist, in the 1990’s. There is implicit
in the act of Mumbai’s sweeping name changes a certain disregard for history. The regionalist and
nationalist motivations to reclaim the city belie the fact that Mumbai might never have existed were
it not for the Imperialists. In the same way that politicians casually raze the memories embedded
in Colonial era names in Mumbai, one wonders if they would also hope for the destruction of its
Colonial era buildings.
Yet Crawford Market has been a historically important battleground for Mumbai’s inherent
global, cosmopolitan and pluralist identity. In colonial times the building was the city’s primary
supplier of provisions, and it served as an important site for cultural mixing due to its location
at what was then the border between the British Fort area and the native settlements. Equally
accessible to both groups, the market was one of few places where the Colonials would rub elbows
with Indians of many different communities. A mixture of Norman and Gothic architectural styles,
the market was thoroughly Indian in its use—an active bazaar that catered to all social and religious
demographics. Even then it characterized an essential duality between globalism and local culture.
Today, the city has grown around it, and the neighborhood in which the market stands is
now referred to as either “Crawford Market” or Mohammed Ali Road. A busy commercial area, the

84

market’s environs are densely occupied and surrounded by five- and six-storey buildings housing
shops and restaurants on their ground floors, while its side streets are lined with informal merchants,
handymen, and food vendors. The area is a virtuosic representation of kuccha Mumbai: motley,
rapidly moving, and ever-changing. Yet its crowded, noisy, gritty vibrancy obscures the market’s
proximity and simultaneous conjunction with the city’s formal sector of monumental, colonial
government buildings, schools, and parks.
The building, itself, exemplifies the contradictions between these manifold tensions. Made
up of a main shed structure housing formal stall arrangement and shops, and an informal back area,
the market is an evocative pragon of both formal and material hybridity. Catering to the requirements
of a highly variable populace, the market remains a meeting place and melting pot of Mumbai’s
countless communities. Further, Crawford Market retains both its global and local pedigrees today
more than ever, for it remains one of the best places in the city to find imported goods, while still
housing space for the sale of local fruits and produce. Intrinsic to its program, Crawford Market
implicates issues about consumerism and modern spectacle as relevant not only to a cinema city like
Mumbai but to the supermodern condition in general.
Yet, the market has begun to show its age in several ways. While much of Mumbai’s meat
and poultry is still butchered and sold on site, the market has become more of a wholesale provider,
selling mainly to restaurants and hotels. Further, the city’s main fruit and vegetable distribution
has moved to Dadar in the North. Having lost customers because of this and the rapidly growing

85

86

87

I. Mapping the Market: Referents

There exists an
emphasis on the roof
line and a tectonic
clarity in the pitched
roof’s infill evocative
of the Norman and
Gothic influence on the
building

The punched
ornamentation uses an
indian floral motif,
allowing for a sense of
locality in the
building’s language

88

Lockwood Kipling’s
mural above the main
entrance depicts
Indian peasants in an
agrarian setting,
hinting at the
building’s program

The pointed arch
windows are Victorian
treatment but remain
evocative of Mughal
and Indo-Saracenic
flourishes

The window ornament,
again with Victorian
detail, also evokes an
indian jhali or screen
motif

Elements of the
siteplan evoke how
the market has
changed over time
with the formal
original building and
the informal nature
of the newer stall
development

The Fountain at the
lot’s center shows
that the building
existed as courtyard
before it was run
over by informal
vendors

The Main Building’s
arched portals
evoke entrance in
language and scale,
yet the the heavy,
closed off nature of
the plan suggests
that this functions
inefficiently

The Hinge’s second
floor office space
indicates that the
building’s tower once
functioned, like many
markets of its time, in
an administrative and
government role

The Building’s
section and
structure are
illustrative of the
material and
structural difference
between the Main
Building’s tower
(heavy masonry)
and the goods area
(cable trusses)

Many nineteenth
century market
buildings used a
clock tower and
spire to signal the
presence of a
community gathering place

89

supermarket industry in Mumbai, the remaining produce vendors sit dejectedly at their places
and generally leave by the early afternoon. The market’s hybrid personality is also manifest in
its existence as both a historic monument and a living, changing building. Classified as a Grade
1 historical monument in Mumbai, changes to the building must undergo the strictest possible
scrutiny and ideas about history, preservation, and re-use as they relate to politics and memory must
be considered in the building’s redesign.
Crawford Market is a site of confluence and intersection between crucial concerns in the
prevailing architectural discourse. Its capacity to negotiate the boundaries and interstices between
these concerns makes it a sufficiently urgent and complex testing ground for a compelling and
contemporary architectural act.
In tracing the evolving veins of architectural, anthropological, and preservationist
thought, one finds that these currents become most forceful and relevant to societal need when they
instill within themselves a sense of penetrating analysis. As regionalism matured into a Critical
Regionalism, historical preservation must become Critical Preservation, and so on. The element of
criticality requires an initial recognizance of existing, essential conditions. It is only when Kenneth
Frampton begins to dissect and distill the elements of what is truly regional that the Regionalist
movement is transformed. The preservation and subsequent reimagining of Crawford Market
requires a similar rigor. Here, one must understand what the true essence of the market is, and
allow for the redesign to recapture, revalorize, and resuscitate this condition. The possibility of
critical preservation is particularly well suited to Mumbai for a number of reasons: first, the city has
undergone such rapid changes in recent history, that traditional programs are no longer relevant.
Restoring, for example, the city’s many cotton mills to their original use would be pointless, as all
such industry has been relocated outside of the metropolis. Such cotton mills, while an important
part of Mumbai’s history and collective memory, occupy important and expensive land in a city
that cannot afford to waste its space. Secondly, the aspect of Mumbai’s kinetic city is not wrapped

90

up in its buildings, but rather in cultural and social practiceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;ritual, movement, and innovative
occupation. Allowing kinetic Mumbai to inform new usages within the monumental is an important
aspect of producing the positive tensions that can reinvent Mumbaiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s genius loci.
In addition to revalorizing the issue of criticality, I have, in this paper, worked to highlight
various dichotomies that shape the current condition of contemporary architectural practice, the
urban climate that characterizes modern Mumbai, and the circumstance of consumption in the
globalized marketplace. In the process of this exploration, specific precedent analyses, historical
and conceptual mappings, and spatial studies (which take the form of this documentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s insets) begin
to anticipate relevant contexts through which the claims of the project of an adaptive reuse of
Crawford Market would situate itself. By mobilizing these constituent contexts, the subsequent
design proposal will seek to elicit productive and positive dialectic responses to the complex and
contradictory tensions between global and regional, universal and local, preservation and reuse,
authentic and pastiche, and kinetic and static, that infuses the current climate in which we strive to
theorize and practice relevant architectural acts.